The dreck about Trump ending 'democracy'

Swamp regular Admiral James Stavridis has taken his best shot at addressing a phony issue: whether "democracy" is dying, killed off by President Trump, presumably, by offering reassuring words to the left and the Washington establishment about its durability in a cover essay in Time. Axios has the write-up and a photo of the cover.

I suppose a lot of them are going to take grim satisfaction from it, given the level of hysteria on the left about President Trump's very existence.

Canard - Left - Time - Magazine - Idea

But it rather too cutely frames a canard. The left, including Time magazine, seems all in for the idea that democracy is crumbling – get a load of the magazine's new cover – and is using Stavridis to say grand things in response. It's incredible windbaggery.

Stavridis writes:

Democracy - Competitor - Strongmen - Part - Governments

Once again, it seems, democracy has a competitor. Strongmen are rising in part because elected governments are struggling to address new challenges: global migration, technological advances, transnational terrorism, international economic unrest. More and more people are willing to try, or tolerate, another approach.

He cites a lot of countries with problems that have elected strongmen, as if that's never been done before, and after that, he doesn't take long to get to what he and his readers really want: President Trump, the great destroyer of democracy.

Trump - Norms - Falsehoods - Number - Thousands

Trump himself has shunned traditional norms: his documented falsehoods now number in the thousands, and his rhetoric seeks to chill freedom of the press and undermine the nation's institutions of democracy.

Perhaps Trump views his embrace of America's longtime ideological foe as a clever negotiating strategy. Others see a darker future in which political speech is punished, religions are oppressed and the rights of millions are taken away. Media coverage and recent books underscore the doomsday scenario, from David Runciman's How Democracy Ends to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's Fascism:...